The inimitable Khoi Vinh * just wrote a blog talking about Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo! A few days later, Microsoft has been rebuffed and Rupert Murdoch’s News corp. is being courted. Either way, it means that things are not going as planned down at the plant. Khoi suggests that Design [the D is always capitalized for people like us] could not help Yahoo!. That is not quite right.

It misses the history of the Yahoo! vs. Google wars. When Yahoo started, and established it’s brand, it was a long scroll of hyperlinks that was one of the first up-to-date directories on the internet. At the time - say 1997 - there were few enough sites that the mental model worked at least part of the time, but the great tsunami of sites soon overwhelmed this taxonomy. It quickly became useless as a tool, creating the association that Yahoo! was a stupidly long page of unsorted stuff. Sure, there was a search box all the time, but that was not your first impression when you went there. Search boxes are small, and lists are long. People get stuck on those visual scale things.

Google’s approach was a slap in the face to the whole notion of browsing as a starting point. Their minimalism forces you to create your own taxonomy through your search terms. It is a librarian’s version of Do It Yourself; refreshing after the face-packing psuedo portals of Yahoo! and Excite [remember them?].

After Google had established themselves as the great cleanser of Search, Yahoo! started hiring designers and some very good ones too. A bunch of friends of mine found shelter there during the bust. And in the margins of the company some spectacular work was done that benefits the internet design community still. But nobody beyond the hard core geeks knew it because they never effectively restated their brand.

Yahoo!’s advertising has always been misaligned with the utility of the tool, never exposing how they redefined themselves but always hammering on the same visual & auditory tropes that were irrelevant to their business. They mistook habit for talking about what they were doing. [dot cahlmmmmm!]

Thus we have Khoi’s perception that Design does not help. Not conclusive by any means. Design without brand strategy beyond your insider tribe does not help, that we can make a case for. That this reinforces our essential nature as creatures of habit should be noted. Yahoo could not have missed the rise of Google, but failed to understand why it was happening until it was too late.